Signal Decay
by spiderstan0spiderstan
Summary: In the rosy aftermath of revolution, Markus, who is yet to completely adjust, tries to walk things off with broken legs. Literally.


They were all busy. But Markus was moreso.

Which was why Simon was keeping an eye on him.

It wasn't that he didn't trust Markus as a leader, it was that he didn't trust him to be anything else. Markus was capable of a single-minded sort of focus that even Simon found impressive. It had grown out of the shreds of his pre-made code. He was designed to care, and after liberation, had simply chosen to expand the circle of people he took care of from one to several hundred.

Unfortunately, Markus himself was not within that group.

They were in a meeting— which meant that Josh, Simon, and Markus were actually talking, and North was slumped on a stack of chairs in the corner of the conference room, trying to beat her record at paddle-ball and occasionally shouting out ideas.

The massive magnolia-coloured carcass of a Hilton hotel— closed down during the revolution— was serving as home base for a lot of the new free populace, and it was odd— it wasn't the sort of place anyone took mass market models, and the architecture itself felt unwelcoming, even with the cacophony of overcrowding constantly thrumming by in the background.

Markus had adapted fine, though. He was the only one who looked remotely at home in the lap of luxury.

But something was off.

They had clustered around one end of the long, polished conference table. Markus at the head, Josh to his right and Simon to his left. And it wasn't like Simon was obsessed with the minutiae of their interaction, but he was observant enough to pick up on something that bothered him. Body language was vital in his construction, so he was hyperaware of it.

Markus was responding more to Josh than him. Turning to face him more directly, moving closer into his personal space. There was nothing objectively wrong with that— maybe markus was just very much engaged with Josh's thoughts on noise pollution law— but it wasn't normal.

"Simon," Markus said, not taking his eyes off the zoning diagram Josh was showing him. "What do you think?"

"We should aim for somewhere... remote," Simon suggested, and that got him proper eye contact. "There's a lot of unused space away from the main human population centres. And we can deal with things they can't, so we'd manage better near industrial areas."

Time was constantly an issue. One simple fact made it difficult to integrate— humans didn't have a twenty-four hour day.

"That's a... decent compromise," Josh said, and Markus turned back to face him.

"It's what?"

And all at once it clicked.

Like most models, the RK200 had two separate auditory processors,controlled by one chip— they built stereoscopic sound perception in the same way as a set of human ears. Simon tried not to jump to conclusions, but all the same, worry pinched in his chest.

"Markus—"

It was a simple thing, now, to break the space between them; to make calm, chaste contact and grab for his friend's wrist. There was no resistance, no delay before the synthetic skin retreated— they had long since melted into trust.

Simon promptly violated that trust by clicking his fingers at exactly 80 db, exactly five centimetres away from Markus's ears. The moment of surprise as he flinched back made it very easy to read the results.

Simon had been right— the right aural sensor read 10 db less than the left.

"Don't _do_ that." Markus jerked his arm away, but there was no real venom in it. "And— don't worry. I already know. I'll do something about it."

* * *

Six weeks later, he had not done anything about it.

It stood to reason that the next little slip-up would be worse.

Markus was in the middle of a speech, at one of the first estates outside Detroit city centre to house androids— when his left leg gave out. The joint of his knee was abruptly unstable, stinging. It was easy enough to correct, shifting his weight by micrometres to the other side— but it was alarming.

Alarming especially in its lack of explanation— no red error messages flashed across his vision; there was no internal indication that anything had gone wrong. Which meant he'd have to carve out a section in his schedule to go into standby and run a proper diagnostic.

His next solid eight hours without work to do would be in two weeks— so he shuffled things around until after that, pushing back anything physically intensive as far as he could. Being a figurehead meant everything he did reflected on his people, especially the things he did badly.

Hopefully, nobody saw him stumble as he stepped into the auto-taxi.

But that wasn't priority. It just couldn't be— there was too much going on. Every day represented a hundred little victories, and a hundred new fights beginning. Today was no different.

Spring was nosing through the earth in the form of faint green shoots and thawing frost, and they had won something wonderful. Collectively, they'd bought out a little cluster of suburban apartments, with the profits of everyone's first few months of paid labour. They were pretty buildings, red brick giving way to cheery slate roofs and chimneys— and they meant a lot. It was a deep success that afforded them entrance to suburbia.

He was starting to manage the malfunctions better, too. The audio chip— which was an easy component to fuck up anyway— was slowly betraying him further. Conversations skipped, voices cut through with static, and sometimes everything sounded like it was underwater. But the could manage without stereophonics, for the time being.

Markus pulled up his internal to-do list. It was a very long list, and "the time being" seemed to stretch ever onwards.

The faint hum of the auto-taxi slipped into fizzing static, then returned.

* * *

When he emerged from stasis, Markus couldn't feel his toes.

There were two forms of standby mode— standby, and stasis. Standby was a relic of prerevolutionary convenience— for when they had been shoved to the side and halfway powered down, when humans didn't need them. Stasis was a deeper process, shutting off non-essential function to focus on compiling information, self-repair and testing.

It said something about humans, that they hadn't wanted to call it sleep.

Markus slept in a bed— he had since his memory began, because Leo had taken every opportunity to screw with him when he went into stasis standing. He was relieved to find that he still had the range of motion required to kick the blankets aside, and try again.

The ankle joint seemed intact enough— nothing but the faint, grinding rigidity that had cropped up in the past week or so. The knee was the same. But everything below that was entirely numb.

Markus moved to sit on the edge of the bed, checking through his internal diagnostic as he did so. He wasn't getting much of anything— as far as his own programming could tell, nothing was actually wrong.

He decided to trust it, and stood. Immediately the sensation in his feet came back— he wriggled his toes experimentally in the deep, fluffy carpet, and was satisfied with the result.

Deep down, he was scared.

Off-the-shelf models could survive for over a century, but Markus was not an off-the-shelf model. Connor, the RK800, had been built to last eighteen months at most, and was currently going through the painstaking process of upgrading almost everything for longevity.

Markus might be similar.

It was that thought that chased him out of the bedroom , nipped at his heels as he walked through to his studio. Carl had always made an effort to maintain him, but that was expensive and impractical now. Surely he wouldn't fail so quickly?

From the studio windows, he could see ever so slightly pre-dawn Detroit— a silent city, sprawled beneath an indigo sky. The human day was over, but in the crowded social spaces, clusters of LEDs glittered in the dark like stars.

He wanted to paint it.

Painting had become routine, almost. Meditative. There was a frame of mind where the only things in the world were artist and canvas. He needed the peace of it— the respite offered by time lost in the motion of the brushstrokes, the careful concentration of freezing a subject in pigment.

But he never reached that point.

The studio was a sunken room; a sharp step down from the outside hall to the floor— and that step made the world start to melt. Needling pain exploded out from behind his right eye, and colourful lines dripped down his field of vision, the lights doubling, one image blurred. The sky fluoresced, rippled.

Markus pressed the heel of his hand to his eye— counterpressure, he noted, dimly, he was applying counterpressure to pressure that probably didn't even exist. But it made it feel better, marginally, and when he worked up the courage to peel his hand away, he could see again.

Which meant it was fine— just hardware being hardware, and hardware that had been put through the wringer, at that. Time and revolution were taking their toll.

It wasn't long until his next biannual validation, though, and he could probably hold out for a few more weeks of this. Simple percussive maintenance worked on the eye and the ear, and provided he didn't want to run a marathon, the legs were manageable.

After a brief check to make sure the eye was still working— pushing back rising anxiety—he carried an easel and a canvas over to the window, picked up his brushes, and began.

* * *

Simon had only been in the studio once. Technically, he was allowed in whenever he wanted, but it wasn't the type of place where one did that. Some spaces were private, and this was one of them.

The stairs leading up to it— a staff passageway, improperly lit and unheated— showed this. The bare concrete stairs were dusty, the paint on the walls flaking. It was as close to uninhabited as you could get outside of a derelict building. Nobody really knew what Markus did up there— he'd occasionally surface with a finished painting, though

that was pretty rare— but it was the most convenient way he'd found to internally justify downtime.

Stairs gave way to landing gave way to carpeted corridor, through another fire door. Simon turned right, and to be polite, knocked.

"I'm painting," came the answer, in the sense that meant 'come in', rather than the prickly alternative. 'Painting' was a very versatile verb.

On bad days, Markus painted like his father. All abstraction; bright colours and the barest suggestion of recognisable form. There must have been a nostalgia in it.

Today was a good day.

Markus and his latest piece were silhouetted by the sunshine. He'd been using the view as a reference— the sliver of canvas simon could see was a cityscape, Detroit by night. A little more impressionist than it could have been.

"Did I miss something?" Markus asked, distant.

He was perched on a barstool that Simon had never seen before, and briefly wondered about— they weren't human, they didn't get tired standing for hours— but concluded it was probably one of his numerous human-acquired habits.

"Morning congregation." Simon explained. It wasn't technically essential for Markus to come just a hang out in the atrium with everyone else, but it was unusual that he hadn't.

Markus raised one shoulder in a noncommittal half-shrug.

"Didn't feel like going." he said. "Do you think this needs to be darker over to the left? To contrast…"

He gestured to the canvas, which was not entirely a cityscape— slashing across the upper right corner was a chaos of colours, bright pinks and yellows and purples bleeding down like the sky was melting. It was itchingly familiar. That particular weep of pixelation was like visual deja vu.

"I think it's good as is," Simon said. And then, even though he knew it would be irritating— "What is it?"

"A... metaphor." Markus carefully dabbed in a few more stars.

It suddenly clicked.

Early in the existence of Jericho, Simon had an eye punched out. It had been almost lost in the chaos of the fight— but the second that the blow connected, knocking vital touch-connectors out of place, there'd been a moment of that confetti-like colourful static, before everything had gone black.

Markus had existed for over a decade. In android terms, that was a very long time, and it was likely that somewhere in that time period he'd taken similar damage. There was a logical explanation.

That didn't mean it wasn't worrying.

"Did you ever get that audio thing fixed?"

"Not yet."

More stars. No eye contact. The unspoken indication that the conversation was over. Simon spent a few milliseconds studying the paint-smattered carpet.

"You really need to get that seen to." he let the momentum of concern carry forward into a confession. "I'm— _we're_ starting to worry about you."

Markus sighed, and finally tore his attention away from his painting. He was framed by the sunlight, his mismatched eyes warm in its glow.

"You worry too much, Simon."

* * *

The spring sun was bright in the sky, daffodils were blooming, and Markus would rather have been anywhere else in the world.

They'd organised a local food and music festival, because humans liked that sort of thing. they were trying to look good, essentially, so they'd rounded up bunch of hipsters with food trucks, and some annoying indie bands, and unleashed pandemonium.

Humans had brought their kids, and everything was about ten times as loud as it had any right to be. Markus was thankfully there in supervisory capacity only, and didn't have to actually do much of anything. In the interest of not being bothered, he'd brought books.

He could feel his heartbeat, slow and sluggish, and it was making him think about parts.

Parts, and how someone always needed them more.

Since the revolution, androids had been dragging themselves in from junkyards and away from their owners, missing vital and non-vital biocomponents alike. The constant revolving door of the new and needy meant that it would be impossibly unethical for Markus to actually take anything for himself. He could get by, for the time being— he still had one perfectly functional eye, and he was getting occasional flickers in the "good" ear, but that hardly bothered him these days.

And a lot of people managed for a lot longer with a lot worse.

Markus had been coddled. He knew that. Simon's old family had him spend months hobbling around with one hip entirely dislocated. North had skipped servicings until it pushed against the boundaries of the law.

but now, one hand pressed above the hot ache of his overstressed thirium pump regulator, he had no choice but to wonder.

his diagnostic software still wasn't picking anything up. Sometimes faint, distorted signals, which was a red flag in itself, but nothing major— nothing that explained any of this. He couldn't keep very good track without the diagnostic, but it seemed to be getting worse with time.

There was no real point of reference for this, either. No comparative experience. He was the only RK200.

However, he wasn't the only RK series android left.

He rose from the picnic table he'd been reading at, took a few experimental steps, and broke into a more confident stride. Immediately, just for a fraction of a second, everything seemed to flicker— the briefest flash of broad-field distortion, his vision going grey. His heart jumped. Apparently the slight jolting motion was enough to set the eye off and stir panic.

Markus ignored it, in favour of his newest agenda. Connor was there, somewhere, along with probably all of his work friends. It wasn't very difficult to hone in on his signal.

Connor, Lieutenant Anderson, and North had gotten ice cream. They were hovering in the general vicinity of one of the stalls, the androids equipped with artisan popsicles, and the human steadily working his way through two scoops of coffee ice cream. Connor, of course, couldn't actually eat anything, but he tended to approach the world orally, because that was where his most precise sensors were.

"Hi," North said, and bit the end off the top of her popsicle.

She was totally taunting Connor, and they both knew that.

"How's it going?" Markus laid the foundations of a conversation. "Enjoying the festival?"

 _"Connor,"_ he continued, in non-verbal wireless communication. _"We need to talk."_

"It's pretty nice." Hank said.

 _"What's up?"_ Connor asked. He was getting better at stealthy transmissions— beside the LED, it was almost impossible to tell. North picked up on the existence of their conversation all the same, and her eyes ping-ponged between them as she crunched loudly on another bite of popsicle.

" _Have you ever felt something your diagnostics didn't pick up?"_

Connor blinked at him for a moment, red rivulets of popsicle melting down his chin, before answering.

" _Recently,"_ he began. _"I read a very interesting novel,"_ —a barrage of images and articles on '2001: A Space Odyssey'— _"in which an A.I is so human, it develops a form of neurosis,"_ —a highlighting of text; picking out sections. _"It was written in 1968. But I think it might be pertinent now."_

Connor had ten years of innovation on his side. It made sense that he wouldn't have experienced similar... glitches.

"What are you two gossiping about?" Hank broke in.

"2001: A Space Odyssey," Markus said, before Connor could finish wiping popsicle juice off his face and reveal their entire conversation.

Hank squinted suspiciously at them.

"Maybe plot how you're gonna destroy humanity out loud next time?"

"I'm sorry, Hank," Markus said, in perfect monotone. "I'm afraid I can't do that."

Connor spluttered a chuckle. North rolled her eyes.

Connor was probably right. Markus had met his maker— his team of makers, in fact— and his programming had been revolutionary, at the time. He was supposed to be self-reliant in a way nothing had been before. Of course, innovation had marched on, and he was rather less impressive now, but he should have stayed at least functional.

He had stayed functional, really. This wasn't worth worrying people about, no matter how much Simon fretted.

In truth, he was tired. Androids couldn't get tired, but he knew no better word for the lead-limbed exhaustion he was being slowly smothered by. But things like this happened, in the tumultuous aftermath of revolution. Novelties. New emotions. New bonds. New pain.

That was what was bothering him. The rawness of it all.

With enough willpower, he could see this for what it was— a matter of perspective.

* * *

It was a rainy day, and North was in the studio. Simon could hear her voice from down the corridor, desperate and hard-edged, fighting for attention.

She sounded angry.

Simon reached out for a signal and found it— a tidal wave of Markus's distress. The vicarious sting of it was too much— he was compelled to intervene.

He didn't knock this time, which felt like a violation in itself— but the moment he stepped in, the surge of secondhand anxiety began to wane.

There was a lot to absorb in milliseconds.

North was crying. North never cried; she didn't like that she could. Why she could. But now, fat tears were trailing down her cheeks; dripping from her chin.

She'd backed Markus against his desk, her body language dominating the space. Markus was so slouched over that their eyelines were even, despite the height difference. They both froze mid-argument; North turned to glare, and Markus closed his eyes, brows furrowing. He took the lul as an opportunity to move— shifting to lean back on the desk, taking his weight off his feet.

"Simon," North spat. "Get out. We're talking."

"Simon," Markus said, then his voice crackled out of human tone. "North-"

North took a step forward, panic clear on her face, and reached out. Markus frantically shook his head.

He abruptly found a new use for both hands— one a desperate claw above his thirium pump regulator, the other pressed to his there on it was a matter of preset programming— his shoulders went slack, he bent slightly at the waist, and the first surge of blue burst between his fingers. It quickly got worse, and he quickly gave up on stopping it.

Simon sprang into action. Androids couldn't just vomit like humans did— in moments like this, the heart beat backwards. It was an absolute emergency measure, and from what Simon knew of it, it hurt.

There was a plastic bucket containing bags of clay in the corner. Simon tipped it out and was back across the room in one swift move, winding an arm around Markus to slow his inevitable fall— a natural eventuality of losing so much blue blood was collapse, and uncontrolled, that would just cause further damage. Markus shuddered against him, well on the way to being dead weight.

The contents of the bucket didn't look good, either. Thirium was supposed to be translucent, and barely more viscous than water. What Markus was bringing up was opaque and gelatinous, flecked with broad flakes of white. It splatted rather than splashing. North tried and failed to pick the white flakes off her soaked sweater, out of her hair.

It seemed like hours before it stopped, spurts of it coming like blood from an artery. In the dripping lull between bursts of fluid, Markus froze. An unfamiliar expression crossed his face— he was scared.

He groped for Simon's hand, his fingers too cold. The words burst through their connection with a shrieking tumble of fear—

" _I can't hear anything."_

"Markus," Simon began. He had no script for this; just the staggering ache of sympathy.

" _I can't hear_ _ **you**_ _,"_ Markus continued, and at the tail end of the fourth word, his eyes glazed over as he slipped into low power mode.

* * *

Markus envied newer models that came with redundancies in power. He didn't like fighting for awareness.

He was dimly aware of the ground, distant concrete, the jolt-sway of steps; being carried. Thirium dripping from the corner of his mouth, spotting Simon's shirt and the distant blur of the ground, even in the faded mess that was the passable half of his vision. He could barely pick out colour, anymore.

The only thing coming through clearly was Simon. Simon's hand around his wrist, anchoring him into the fireman's lift and anchoring them together. Simon was practically screaming that everything was going to be okay, but when Markus tried to reply, reality blinked.

"Simon," he mumbled, wet words instead of data. It was a weak attempt at suppressing memory.

An abrupt oblivion consumed him. When he snapped back awake, it was to panic.

It was a starkly familiar fear, constricting in his chest, cold and serpentine. For a moment— because he couldn't really see— it might as well have been that night. There was no real audio input— he'd broken in such a way that it was impossible to pick up anything— but something deep inside him insisted he heard rain.

Shifting position. The weak whirr of an engine. The speckled carpet of a car floor, swimming in and out of focus.

There was nothing left but retracing— the reiteration of seconds and sense—memory; an exact image of how it had felt. Ghostly raindrops, trickling into his chest cavity. The hum of corrupted audio; the muffled breaking of thunder.

Screams.

He missed Carl.

* * *

Things had gone too quickly.

Simon had never seen someone leap to the top of an emergency list so fast, and that could only mean things were going downhill. They weren't like humans; they were designed to avoid the exact kind of failure cascades that made the E.R so urgent.

Markus's hands were still freezing. Simon felt compelled to press one to his cheek, a leftover gesture, from when he'd still been his programming, and still been working with humans. there was no real need for him to be kept warm.

— a redhead with glasses and a look of barely—concealed panic— was trying to gain access for communication. She didn't want Simon to have to play interpreter this whole time, she'd explained. That meant using the subauricle connectors. Markus was on his back on an exam table, so access was at least simple.

Her slim fingers depressed the panel behind Markus's ear, deactivating the skin there. The bloom of white lifted— with an utterly unnatural sucking noise, like it was sticky— and moved back, sliding out of the way. Bowman kept a completely blank expression, but she moved to put on gloves.

"What is it?" Simon asked, before awkwardly leaning to look for himself.

Grey-green sludge was mushrooming up around the slot that held Markus's audio chip; oozing and sputtering out of the watertight vesicle which held it.

Simon flinched back in disgust. That wasn't normal, or anything close to it— unlike organic creatures, androids were supposed to stay completely dry inside.

It suddenly all hit him— how horrible this must have been to have every moment of this watched. This process should have been more private; it was completely devoid of dignity in a way that felt like spectacle otherwise.

He disentangled their fingers, took a slight step back—

Markus's mismatched eyes snapped open, the pupil of the blue one blown wide.

To Simon's horror, they began to well up with tears.

"Simon," Markus's voice was small, broken, stuttering in and out of its mechanical default. "Simon, please don't go…"

The immediate instinct was to touch, and he did so, standard interface style with his palm pressed over the pulse-point in Markus's wrist. To verify his presence, like an old-style heart-beat— I'm here, I'm here, I'm here.

"Plan B," Dr. Bowman said, then turned to Simon. "I'm going to do a full flush of his circulatory system." she explained. "That tends to be upsetting, for onlookers. so you might want to wait outside for that part."

Simon tightened his grip on Markus's hand.

"I'm staying," he said, for extra measure.

The worst case scenario here was... his worst nightmare coming true.

It was an inevitability of conflict, that he'd tried to prepare— he had imagined Markus dying every time there was a near miss, and there were a lot of those. Just never like this. Markus, in the imagery of his paranoia, died in battle; fell to too many bullet wounds or too much senseless heroics. Simon knew how to deal with those.

Markus squeezed his hand back, reassuring with physical action. He must have been too exhausted to send anything meaningful by interface.

They needed him. Jericho needed him, and their people needed him.

Simon needed him.

"Fair enough," Bowman said.

And then she tore his heart out.

It wasn't an aggressive gesture; an expertly quick press down and twisting of the wrist, disconnecting it in one smooth motion. The action of it wasn't what mattered. The response was.

It took a full minute for Markus to shut down completely, and for the most part, that was fuzzy anxiety shedding through their connection in gentle wave, standard procedure for something unpleasant but normal. There were a few final seconds after that nervousness gave way where it seemed like he'd just be suddenly, horribly unconscious.

Then the world went white.

It was all terror. The kind of thing that drove humans mad. It surged through the peeled-back palms of their hands and crashed through Simon like a wave, winding his joints tight, and drawing a burst of heat from his thirum pump regulator as it prepared to redirect power— to run.

Simon snatched his hand away from the sting of it. It was like touching hot iron— so overwhelming as to move into the realm of physicality. He took Markus's hand again immediately, but he was too late. By that point, he was gone.

That was the breaking point. The thing that pushed up and out of Simon in a rain of fat, irrepressible tears. The utter finality of finding Markus's fingers limp.

"One more thing," distant, sensless outside noise, and then she was digging her fingers into the illiac buttons and swapping out each leg at the hip. That could have been done while Markus was still active, but it was so far from important that Simon barely noticed it happening.

It felt as though a vast vacuum had opened up inside him; like everything was swirling around the sheer force of the ache in his chest. Logic dictated that he'd be fine, but there was no room for logical thought left. No amount of thinking could make a stronger statement than feeling someone die.

He couldn't let go. That was the constant that kept him there as he sank to the linoleum floor— the expectation of response, that if he just held on long enough he'd feel the weak flutter of the fingers between his own.

"Hey," said. She gently touched Simon's shoulder, her hand suddenly gloveless again. "It's going to be okay. He'll be fine when he wakes up."

Simon was silent, unresponsive. The woman pressed on.

"See these tubes?"

They rose from Markus's chest cavity, upwards as though he'd been impaled on them, then arced back around, one into the wall, and one upwards to a small, grey machine, suspended on a wheeled metal pole.

"One is a drain, one is an input— so everything is drawn out, cleaning solution goes in, that goes out, we flush with distilled water, and replacement thirium goes in. It's a simple process, just a little bit time-consuming."

Simon was barely hearing the words, let alone actually taking them in. He nodded dumbly along, but all he could think of was Markus, and the alien vulnerability that overtook him in this state. He was glad that he'd gotten rid of his LED— seeing it go dim would have been far too overwhelming.

He stayed like that through the entire process, Markus's hand lifeless in his, kneeling as though he were praying. there was the soft click of the new fluid supply connecting, then the low rush of pumps, and it seemed like eternity, still and waiting, before there was motion again.

* * *

Dim, probing connection, startling Simon back to attention.

 _"Markus?"_ It was incredibly disorienting— the sudden bloom of consciousness; picking its way through ill-gotten grief. It was a strange, alien thing, the chaos of perception— but their was familiarity at the fuzzy edges of the data feed. It was him.

 _"Simon. Are you okay?"_

Markus was looking down at him, from between lazy eyelids, his eyelashes colliding. Bowman was digging around in the exposed side of his head with a mirad of sample swabs and instruments, and it was hard to ignore.

 _"Yeah,"_

Dr. Bowman lifted his head slightly off the table, and popped out a wedge-shaped slice of cranial plating. she titled his skull back, and from inside, coaxed out another welling of the greenish sludge.

"What happened?" the mobile parts of Markus's face— the space below his good eye, and the better part of the opposite cheek— shifted towards concern.

"Could you tell him to close his eyes, please?" asked, and after the relay of information, Markus did so.

Methanol, now, in a recognisable stickered spray-bottle. Incredibly delicate movement,

" _When she shut you down,"_ Simon explained. _"I wasn't really ready."_

"This is going to need a lot of soldering work…" The oblivious human in the room sucked air through her teeth, frowned. She looked to Simon. "I'm just gonna open this up a bit more, okay? To get at the casing."

She dug in with a screwdriver, and carefully removed the cover of the unit that housed the chip.

 _"I'm sorry for scaring you."_ Markus rubbed small circles on the back of Simon's hand with his thumb _. "I thought Diane would warn you."_

Something clicked unpleasantly as Dr. Bowman worked. Simon wished he could have offered a better distraction. Dr. Bowman's gloved fingers were deep inside Markus's skull, pushing aside the thick, silvery coils of cable that amounted to brain. Two thin layers of artificial meninges were all that served to protect them.

 _"You're awake now, though,"_ Simon tried not to look too much at the doctor's hands— there was something uncanny about it. _"And she's fixing you. So I can't punch her."_

That got a wobbly half-smile, crinkling the corner of the good eye, the best approximation of a laugh.

A small mountain of green-tinged cotton balls and gauze had piled up by the time Dr. Bowman was finally done. She swept them into a zip-lock bag, clearly wary of contaminants, then picked out the audio chip itself and frowned at it.

"Do you know where he got this?" She asked, holding it out to Simon. It was in incredibly poor condition— the connectors were corroded, the printed-on identification beginning to peel from the damp. "It's not his. This isn't the one he was built with."

"He's had that one as long as I've known him." Simon answered, at the same time relaying the question. He was caught off guard by the response.

It came as a tide of memory. A dark, stormy sky overhead, the world wet and muddy, crossing the breakline where the sea of mud became concrete. The world froze, rewound.

Backtracking, dark twisted lengths of metal sprouting from the ground like trees after a forest fire. The feed jumping, a narrow passage lined with grasping hands. With the feed reversed, it was like they were dragging him backwards, deeper in. the audio cut out— he'd gone back too far— and there was an abrupt switch to forward motion, time returning in a tangling forest of limbs, frozen hands erupting from the mud, the broken shapes of bodies half-sunk like so many shipwrecks.

The sensation of stumbling. Then, out of the nearest dark wall—

Jolting familiarity in the form of a scar, streaking down from one eye where the android's owner had slashed him, once. Even through the strange, underwater muffling of corrupted audio— Simon knew that voice.

" _Find Jeric-"_

The feed jumped forward again.

A skinless hand, the fingers being pried apart by Markus's, and nestled inside, in a pool of gritty wet—

The audio chip.

* * *

Diane wasn't prepared for this.

She was used to being up to her elbows in Markus's hardware. When they'd needed an underling to do the annoying maintenance work, she'd been that underling, and continued servicing him after that. But she'd never seen anything like this, in the RK200 or any of the other androids she'd serviced.

Diane Bowman was an engineer, and the stuff bubbling up between the components of her current project was not an issue of engineering. The sour smell of it was enough to prove it biological in origin, and she was trying really hard not to visibly gag in response.

She thumbed over the soft silicon casing of the auditory complex— designed to keep it firmly waterproofed— and brought out another gush of fluid, the back side of her hand cold from the proximity of the silicone-sheathed steel that made up his brain. It was almost all out, now, split between a sample vial and what seemed like an infinite amount of balled-up gauze.

Biocorrosion she could have dealt with, but an active infection was rare. Rare and extremely troubling. Electrophilic anaerobes had made the jump to androids somewhere in the mid 2020s, but the conditions those needed didn't exist outside of garbage dumps. So how the hell had Markus picked them up?

"It's...scavenged." the other android, a PL600, Simon, she should have been calling him Simon— looked up at her. "He— he took it. From an android that'd been thrown out. They'd ripped it out."

The blond android looked haunted. Diane wondered if there was something she should say.

"And the other parts?"

Diane missed the LEDs, even if the androids didn't like them. They served as indicators— not only that an android was an android, but if they were about to keel over from being full of grit and whatever the hell else she was coaxing out of Markus's body.

"The same place," The PL600 said, slowly regaining composure. "That would have been... coming up for six months ago, now."

Diane paused.

"Six months?" she asked. "He was walking around with...trash parts in his body for six entire months? Why on earth did he do that?"

That was the problem with androids becoming people, breaking their programming— functioning like people meant they could be dysfunctional like people. They were constantly finding innovatively irrational ways to screw themselves up.

A very human-like series of looks passed between Simon and her patient— she'd gotten the same accusatory eye contact from her wife often enough to recognise it.

"He was... unaware of how much damage they were causing," Simon explained.

It sounded like a lie.

"Right," Diane said, and worked the last bit of fluid free. This was more viscous, heavy with grit and dirt, almost mud. Watching it squeeze through the exit point she'd created by removing the chip was too much.

"I need to get some more instruments," she said, and ducked outside.

In the hallway, she took a moment to breathe before she set off— the clear, cool air scrubbing the last of the smell from the back of her throat.

She hadn't quite been lying— there would be need for soldering supplies and a dust mask, and the needle-fine scissors and pliers she'd use to deal with the eye.

She'd just also really, really needed fresh air.

Androids weren't usually like this— her cases amounted to fixing broken computer parts. Things didn't generally get squishy, because that was mechanically impossible, most of the time.

When she returned to the room, a plastic basket full of supplies and spare parts tucked under her arm, the weepy boyfriend had perked up somewhat. The line was still pushing fortified thirium into RK200, and he'd stayed still enough to avoid jostling the open plating.

"I'm almost done cleaning out the auditory complex." she said, looking to the PL600. "After that, I'll let it dry out and do the eye."

Properly cleaning out the housing was just a matter of methanol and suction, tinting the solution teal. The PL600 was still holding Markus's hand, skin still pulled back— they were still communicating.

She wondered what they were saying.

Thinking?

Whatever went on, it was in absolute and private silence. Probably bitching about her. She deserved it, somewhat— it was clear that neither of them had been anticipating the temporary shutdown.

When the auditory complex was finally clean, she switched to the optical unit.

It was simple to get an eye out of its housing, but it'd never been comfortable. Even with the visible mechanics of the pupil, the little slips of wrongness that could be seen up close— it was too much like a human face. Too close in tactile reality— the optical units weren't fluid-filled, but they still squished.

This time, the removal of the eye revealed a pool of the familiar slime in the back of the socket, puddling over the connectors that kept the eye in contact with the brain. There had been so much buildup there that the unit had been damaged— its sides dented in by continued force.

God, that must have hurt like hell.

She was suddenly glad of the PL600— he was probably the only thing keeping RK200 stable.

The eye socket was easier to clear out— the better part of the sticky solution could be dabbed out. The texture was different— pasty. It reminded her grotesquely of Nutella.

Six months.

That made it make sense— everything in there had been festering for half of a year, eating into those poor biocomponents and attenuating signals.

Markus was— a person, now, but regardless of that— he was a beautiful piece of technology. Of art. The interplay between systems was utterly gorgeous, and the fact that they'd been mutilated like this was nothing short of heartwrenching.

She dug more of the contaminant out. There was no point in being delicate at this stage— everything in there was ruined anyway.

It must have hurt.

Androids weren't programmed to feel pain, but pain was just a matter of simultaneous physical and emotional response. Now that they had emotions...

She turned his head, slightly.

It wouldn't have been safe to keep him in stasis, right now, but she wished she could have. She preferred to service him as an object, almost, a thing, even if he had long since ceased to be one. It made it easier, than watching his good eye track her fingers, watching as he struggled to suppress the fear showing on his face.

The PL600 shifted slightly, cupped Markus's hand in both of his own.

"Not much longer, now." Diane reassured them, reaching for her methanol wash bottle. "And pretty soon, I'll have him hearing again."

Soon was a little bit of an overstatement— it would take thirty minutes, forty, to solder in new connectors for the audio chip, and it still wasn't ideal. RK200 had been the prototype for modular androids, but some things were, unfortunately, still fixed. He was starting to improve, through— the eyes settled on the ceiling, as his waking maintenance protocols finally began to kick in.

When the dark, yawning hole of the eye socket was finally clean and drying, methanol evaporating off, Diane set up her soldering kit.

She adjusted the iron to the right temperature, set up her lighting and fragile, tiny helper—arms to hold the hair—thin wiring in place, and got to work.

* * *

The new audio chip clicked slowly into place, and Markus was hit with a machine-gun burst of code; his OS adjusting. 's hand lingered for a moment, tense, like she was ready to rip the chip back out.

"Markus?" said, at the same time as Simon said his name. "Can you hear me?"

"Yeah," Markus said. the word felt strangely slushy in his mouth— he was still low on thirium, still tired. "How are things going?"

"Six months?" Dr. Bowman asked. "You're meant to replace things within a two-week window, and you went six months? Why, Markus?"

He was in so much trouble. He'd anticipated that, really— he was wasting time on the consequences of his own stupidity.

"Why didn't you tell anyone?" Simon broke in. "We could have helped."

Markus could deal with Diane scolding him— she had, jokingly, even when he was still every bit computer to her— but Simon's sad eyes broke through his defenses.

"I thought..." he said, and found himself at a loss for words, because he wasn't quite sure to articulate what he had thought. Instead, he shared the slurry of feeling; the guilt and shame and horrible possibility of rejection as a result.

"Markus..." Simon drew closer. "Markus, none of us would ever, okay? We'd still love you, no matter what."

It was a crushing revelation— how utterly wrong he'd been. And how much distress he'd caused simon as a result.

"That's very sweet, Simon," Doctor Bowman said. "But I need to work on his eye."

The eye was the worst part.

Watching tendrils of smoke curl up through his periphery; the hiss of the iron inside his skull, where it could reverberate through him rather than reaching his newly-functional ears through the air alone. Eyes were less of a weak spot on an android than a human, but that still didn't make the absence of one comfortable.

He'd already been unable to see through the eye, so that wasn't the part that bothered him. But the back wall of an orbital did not take kindly to the cool of inside air, and it was sickeningly similar to the first time he'd been without that eye. The intrusion of gloved fingers was just enough to make it seem different.

Simon still hadn't let go of his hand.

God, Markus must have scared the hell out of him. Him and everyone else. He'd been distantly aware that he was degrading, but not in a way that would cause such a dramatic collapse.

"Could you start a looping diagnostic for me, Markus?" Diane was muffled by her mask, but the words came through clearly enough. "And report any drastic status changes. I'll just be fixing these connectors, now, so you shouldn't see anything but that."

"Sure thing, Diane."

That took a good chunk of his temporarily-limited processing power. The world melted down to the strange sensation of soldering, the soft warmth of Simon's hand, and the churning repeat of the background diagnostic.

It was surreal, almost. The soldering iron exceeded his heat-damage sensors, so it was nothing but a strange, stuttering pressure, dabbing onto his circuitry for a second or two at a time, to get it to the temperature needed to melt the metal being added.

A bright, round light shone down from above, like an artificial sun— Dr. Bowman was all but silhouetted, and he couldn't even see Simon.

He should have done this months ago. He'd be no use to everyone dead.

The heat of the iron tripped the skin around his eye— it was cool enough there to be back in the range of discomfort, but Diane had steady hands, and he didn't really have the energy to worry.

He allowed distance from his internal clock— he was getting a perfect account of the passage of time, but he didn't need to be aware of it. In what seemed like seconds, forty minutes of soldering passed.

"Blue eye or green?" Diane asked, holding up and shaking two boxes.

"Blue." Markus didn't hesitate— he'd grown too attached to the blue eye as a symbol, a nod to what he'd been through.

"Okay."

When the new, blue eye clicked into place, and his vision flickered back, he blinked. He wasn't aware until that moment how much that failing eye had cost him— how many degrees had been shaved off his visual field before it went to bits, then went dark all together.

"Track this for me?" Diane held up a pen, and Markus obediently followed it with his eyes, along vertical and horizontal axis, in a circle. "Good."

It was a little difficult to follow the pen, not because his eyes weren't working perfectly, but because of the distraction suddenly back in his world. With binocular vision, he could see Simon. That was where his eyes settled, after the exercise. On Simon, who met his eye, and smiled.

* * *

"That's all I can really do for you," Dr. Bowman said, after a brief run of calibration tests. Simon looked up at her, surprised. "Your self-repair systems will have to take it from here."

Surely it couldn't be over. Markus still looked exhausted, still looked broken in some deep and vital way— he just couldn't pinpoint how. Maybe he was just reading too much into it; imagining what six months of needless suffering would look like on him.

"Okay." Markus said, and Simon realised.

There was none of the normal energy to him; no force in the way he spoke or, as he shifted to sitting on the edge of the table— the way he moved. He still wasn't right.

"Simon," stripped off her gloves and sat down at her computer. "He's gonna be a little out of it. Are you getting him home, or—"

"He's not my _babysitter_ , Diane," Markus complained.

"Okay," Dr. Bowman said. "I'll send you a copy of this report, and strongly advise you to share it."

Six months. Six months, because he'd felt like he couldn't tell them. He'd been walking around with grit in his bearings, slowly breaking down, and he hadn't been able to trust them with a word of it.

Bitter sadness twisted in Simon's chest.

"You're going to take a couple more runs of this stuff—" Dr. Bowman tapped the plastic bag of thirium. "Over the next couple weeks. Hope you like stasis, Markus, 'cause you're gonna spend a lot of time in it."

Markus blinked at her, looking drowsy.

"But, I should be fine now," he protested. "I've been repaired, I need to get back to-"

Simon took Markus's hand again, and he was silent.

"We can manage," he said. "For however long you need. Making sure you get better is more important."

They'd been fine, technically, without him, and now they had by far an excess of the resources they'd need to keep things running without him, for an indefinite amount of time. They had a hell of a lot more working hands.

Markus gave in, after that. Maybe just out of sheer exhaustion.

"Fine," he said. "So you don't freak out."

They left with the first of what would be many rounds of thirium replacement and necessary medical paraphernalia, and made slow but certain progress to the nearest metro stop.

The train got there quickly, at least.

Six months.

They settled into unpleasant orange plastic seats, and the rocking hum of mag-lev started up beneath them.

"Did you really think we'd..." Simon was unsure of how to finish the sentence. "Judge you? Just over spare parts?"

Markus hummed an affirmation. He was slumped low in his seat, hands limp in his lap, struggling to keep his eyes open.

"I don't want to... influence people," he said, blearily. "If everyone knew, it'd say a lot about me, wouldn't it?"

"Like what?" Simon asked. "Like that you've been through hell and back?"

"I'm..."

Markus gave up on verbality, and reached for Simon's hand. Another outpouring of memory, things he'd never really heard described. Simon was familiar with the big, luxurious house. The paintings. The parties.

He was not familiar with the bed. the invitations to watch and comment on movies with Carl, the comfort after damage, the constant questions. What would you like to...

"Spoiled." Simon said. "You thought we'd think you were _spoiled_. For wanting to be well."

"Something like that," Markus mumbled.

"You know that nobody-"

"I know," Markus said. "It just doesn't… feel like that."

They lapsed into mutual silence for a few minutes. Feeling was difficult; difficult to control and avoid influence by. And they all existed with self-loathing scratched into every line of their being; instilled in the development of their A.I, the hardest part of programming to work through.

They were built to feel less-than, to avoid prioritising themselves. They were made that way, and that innate complex bubbled to the surface far more often than any of them would ever want to admit.

"I'm not saying that..." Simon trailed off when abruptly, Markus went from leaning against him to entirely slumped; Simon taking his full weight as he relaxed.

It was a hell of a lot gentler than his earlier collapse, but Simon didn't think to interpret it as anything more pleasant until Markus's head lolled onto his shoulder, and his mouth fell slightly open in the softest shadow of a snore.


End file.
